Scientist wins Albany prize for leukemia cell research

Dr. Janet Rowley was honored Tuesday for her scientific discovery in her Hyde Park home on the genetics behind leukemia. (Abel Uribe, Tribune photo)

Dr. Janet Rowley, 88, was a working mother when she made a scientific discovery in her Hyde Park home that would transform how leukemia is studied and treated.

In 1972, she identified a genetic glitch in chronic myelogenous leukemia cells — a swap of genes she called chromosomal translocation — that resulted in the uncontrolled cell growth of cancer. It was the first consistent chromosomal translocation in any human cancer to be discovered.

Rowley and two others are recipients of the Albany Medical Center Prize in Medicine and Biomedical Research, the medical center announced Tuesday, the latest in a long list of honors Rowley has received for her 41-year-old discovery.

"It's remarkable that people still remember (my research)," Rowley said. The prize will be officially awarded May 17.

Rowley received a medical degree at the University of Chicago in 1948 and said she began her research "almost by accident, or a series of accidents."

Her husband, a research pathologist she met in medical school, took a sabbatical in England in 1961. There, she became involved in a research project involving the replication of chromosomes that was "so interesting that I wanted to complete it."

"So I came back to a professor at the University of Chicago and asked if I could have some lab space, and use a microscope, and would he pay me? Luckily, he said yes to all of those things," she said.

When Rowley embarked on her research, there were only one or two other women working in the five-story building and about 25 men, she said. Once her four sons had entered school, she was able to dedicate time to research.

"I could just sit at home and have it be quiet and concentrate," she said. "I was working from photographs. You see the chromosomes under the microscope and you take a photograph of them and you analyze and cut them out and line them up to see how each pair compares. My children used to say I was playing with paper dolls."

Her findings were questioned at first. Two papers that she submitted to prestigious scientific journals were originally rejected.

"It was the first recurring translocation in cancer and had never been described before, so I think they weren't very sure that it was going to be important," she said of her first rejection by the New England Journal of Medicine.

A second paper, submitted to Nature, was rejected but eventually accepted once she included additional research to back her findings.

"I didn't know at all that what I was doing was different or clear that it was going to have any importance," she said. "I was just fortunate that it did."

Rowley shares the prize with Peter Nowell, whose discovery in the 1960s of the "Philadelphia chromosome" in chronic myeloid leukemia established that genetics could be responsible for cancer, and Brian Druker, who in the 1990s helped develop a focused leukemia drug, imatinib, marketed as Gleevec. The three will divide the $500,000 award.

"I have grandchildren in college, so spending it is no problem," Rowley said.

Rowley still lives in the same Hyde Park home where she made her discovery and said she bikes to her U. of C. laboratory several days a week.